WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF

Artificial Intelligence is being used more and more to vet candidates, now it could soon be used to help match them to jobs too.

Recently I wrote a report on the Future of Education 2020 to 2070, and there’s been plenty of speculation about what type and just how many jobs will be automated away by Artificial Intelligence (AI), but now thanks to a Chinese company we might have an AI that actually finds you a job. Now careers and guidance counsellors can keep their copies of What Color Is Your Parachute? to themselves, because neural networks may soon be able to find the perfect jobs for you – that is, atleast, the perfect job that it thinks is right for you based on the information it has about you and its profile of you.

In a recent paper, Baidu researchers revealed they’ve been working on a neural net that can match resumes with skills listed in job postings, finding the exact right match for positions.

The neural network, which is still a work in progress and that’s bluntly called Person-Job Fit, identifies words and phrases in certain  job listings, like “program management” and “project development,” and matches them to skills listed on a candidate’s resume, like “developing projects” and “managing projects.”

If the algorithm identifies relevant experience on someone’s job history, the candidate will be flagged as a potential match for the job opening and they’ll either then be contacted, or, screened – a task that is also becoming much easier to do at scale as more and more companies use AI powered hiring tools like those I’ve discussed before from companies like HireVue which seems to be taking the market by storm at the moment.

Baidu’s new job counsellor still has a little learning to do, though. According to researchers when it came time to sorting people by educational requirements, the algorithm was stumped because nearly every job required a “bachelor’s degree or higher,” get your degrees, folks, and nearly every candidate had a bachelor’s degree or higher, which made it difficult for the algorithm to come up with a short list of candidates.

So, for now at least, I guess those guidance counsellors still have jobs, for now anyways, but the proposition of AI not just taking our jobs, but then helping us find new ones, that we might actually like better and be a better fit for, is an exciting one.

Source: Baidu ACM